Dear Commons Community,
It appears that Donald Trump has decided to skip the upcoming Republican Party’s Presidential Nominee Debate scheduled for this coming Thursday because he does not want Fox News’ Megyn Kelly to be a moderator. Mr. Trump has been sparring with Ms. Kelly since last August when during a debate she questioned his remarks about women. As reported in The New York Times:
“Donald J. Trump and Fox News, the candidate who has reordered the Republican presidential race and the cable network of choice for many of the party’s voters, stared each other down on Tuesday over his demand that the news anchor Megyn Kelly be dumped from moderating Thursday’s debate, the last before Monday’s caucuses.
The network did not blink. So Mr. Trump walked.
Mr. Trump’s announcement here that he would “probably,” or would “most likely,” or was “pretty close to” irrevocably planning to skip the debate — an aide put it more directly — created a gaping uncertainty at the center of the Republican nominating contest just as it was formally about to begin in Iowa.
It was the most intense confrontation yet between two mutually dependent but increasingly antagonistic powerhouses of media and politics. Mr. Trump, who has made the presidential race into a riveting television spectacle, was overtly exploiting the ratings leverage his candidacy has created to try to bend Fox News to his will.
“Let’s see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me,” he said at a news conference here.
Fox News said Mr. Trump’s refusal to debate his rivals was “near unprecedented.”
“This is rooted in one thing — Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,” the network said in a statement.
On her program Tuesday night, Ms. Kelly observed that “what’s interesting here is Trump is not used to not controlling things, as the chief executive of a large organization.”
“But the truth is, he doesn’t get to control the media,” she added.
Mr. Trump’s animus toward Ms. Kelly dates to August, in the first presidential primary debate, when she questioned him about his past comments denigrating women. Afterward, he suggested that Ms. Kelly had been angry at him, so much so that she had blood pouring out of her “wherever” — a remark many saw as a reference to menstruation.
In the months since, Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ms. Kelly as a “third-rate” reporter.
And as Thursday’s debate approached, Mr. Trump began disparaging Ms. Kelly as if he were a prizefighter promoting a rematch. He called her dishonest, accused her of bias and a conflict of interest, and said flat-out that he did not like her.
On Monday, Fox News responded to Mr. Trump, tauntingly saying it was “surprised he’s willing to show that much fear” about being questioned by Ms. Kelly. And on Tuesday, after the network’s president, Roger Ailes, declared that Ms. Kelly would “absolutely be on the debate stage,” the network issued yet another taunting statement, this one mocking two of Mr. Trump’s go-to rhetorical crutches.
“We learned from a secret back channel,” the statement said, “that the ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”
At that, Mr. Trump told Mr. Ailes and his network, effectively, to take a flying leap.”
The other Republican candidates especially Ted Cruz were quick to criticize Trump’s decision and repeated the Fox News line that he [Trump] was afraid of Megyn Kelly. Trump’s skipping the debate can only be viewed as a plus for the other candidates. I do not think that Trump’s decision will change the minds of his most loyal supporters but will definitely hurt him with undecided voters.
Tony
